Yesterday we talked about using Evernote to catalog inspiration and images. Here’s another use I’ve found much along the same lines. As our department grows I find it is useful for me to have visual examples at my fingertips for various things. If I’m looking for a particular look and feel (ie. color grading) in a video piece rather than say “oh, you know, I like the dark tones with a hint of purple and some glows in the red channel and some grain but not too much,” I would rather have a visible example to work from.

Enter Evernote.

Step one, use yesterday’s technique and create an note called “Grading” in your “Ideas” notebook.

Every time you come across an image in your web browsing that catches your attention drag it into that notebook. Done, saved, references are always available. You could get advanced and starting creating various notebooks for different moods, “Grading – cool,” “Grading – warm,” “Grading – sepias,” you get the idea.

And just for fun, here’s a cool way to implement this color grading technique into Photoshop. There’s no easy way to do this in After Effects, but you could render a JPEG sequence and create an automated action to process each frame. Or you could just learn to master color grading in AE to get a similar look.

The Match Color tool can be used to treat one image to look like the colors from another image. This tutorial explains how it works. Where we add to the technique is that you can literally drag a photo out of Evernote and directly into Photoshop making it available for the Match Color tool to use.

It’s no secret that I love Evernote. Here’s a new use I’ve found for it. If you’re a designer or involved in the visual brainstorm process you will likely find this useful.

The problem I’ve faced is that though I’m good at looking at a lot of inspiration over the course of a month I struggle with a way to catalog the things that inspire me. I regularly use Bloglines to read material. It provides a way to “keep post as new” or clip an article but I rarely make it back to those files, and it’s cumbersome to browse them.

I also find myself on different computers when I have the free time to browse. I use a desktop to edit on at work (where I rarely have spare time), I carry a laptop, I use my home computer on occasion, and I use my iPhone for blog reading about 50% of the time. I needed a system for filing and amassing digital images (primarily JPEGs) from all of these sources. The images also need to be viewable from anywhere.

Enter Evernote.

I created a notebook called “Ideas.” About every week or two I create a new post within that note called “Inspire #,” incrementally increasing that number just to keep track of things.

With the Evernote Desktop client I can literally drag a JPEG directly from the web browser directly into that Inspire note. Drag. Drop. Evernote automatically syncs everything.

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A few alternative variations are required to make this solution fully ubiquitous. First, on the iPhone there isn’t a drag and drop.

1. Click and hold your finger on an image for about 2 seconds, you’ll be asked to Save the image.
2. Launch Evernote. You from the title screen choose Saved Photo Note.
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3. Save it to your “Ideas” notebook.
4. When back in the Evernote desktop application select your Inspire note and the newly uploaded image note. Do this by selecting the first note and either Command-clicking (Mac)or Control-clicking (PC) the image. Right click either of the selected notes and choose the last option, “Merge Notes.”

If you are on a computer that does not have the Evernote desktop application on it (like my poor OS X 10.4 machine at the house) just save the image to your desktop. Then using the online version of Evernote attach the images to the Inspire note.

Tomorrow, we’ll talk about another use for this image archiving technique.